Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  “A terrible intimation of age, failing powers, mortality. I suppose I fell ill because I have been deeply depressed these past two and a half years, after the mind-bending labor of El Dorado.” In a Free State had been “a great triumph of will” but had exhausted him. He felt “a very deep fatigue and a great anxiety about the future.” He was thirty-nine.

  I did not understand, though I was sympathetic. I had handed in my resignation in Singapore and given six months’ notice. I also felt anxiety about the future and had no idea where I should go. I was determined to live by my writing. I had two tiny children and no savings. My wife gamely said that she would get a job, but still I was uneasy. My novel Jungle Lovers was about to appear in Britain.

  Vidia reported from his bungalow: “Marvelous reviews!”

  What a pal, I thought, passing on this great news. All the reviews were good—he included the quotes, he underlined the praise, he said that though writing was agony, such reviews were its reward. He was happy for me. “I cannot tell you how your success delights me.”

  My novel was taken seriously by the critics. Such a reception boded well for its U.S. publication a few months away. I was heartened, on the verge of leaving Singapore for good. Another piece of news was that we had found a house to rent in Dorset, not in a village (“polite rural greetings”) but in the depths of the countryside, an old forge on a back road.

  Vidia said the place was not far from his Wiltshire bungalow. He looked forward in the autumn to our visiting him and walking to Stonehenge. When I visited him we could have “an editorial discussion,” he said. In researching my Naipaul book, I had told him I had found many essays and pieces that would comprise a collection of his nonfiction. The countryside was “ridiculously Hardyesque.” One day while out walking he had come upon a sheep-shearing ceremony, which he described in detail: giant shearer, farm laborers, intimidated sheep, cluttered shearing shed, masses of wool grease, ritualistic wrapping of fleece. He made it sound like act 4, scene 3 of The Winter’s Tale. And he concluded, “So many things survive even in our polluted world.”

  Not long after this, I nervously disengaged myself from Singapore. My wife encouraged me. She had helped locate the house in Dorset. We left Singapore on November 1, 1971, exactly three years after arriving there. In that time I had not left Southeast Asia, nor had I made a single phone call—no phone. But then I had not had a phone in Africa either. Eight years without a telephone had sharpened my letter writing. I had published five novels.

  The disorienting experience of going halfway around the world with two young children—overnight in Karachi, a delay in Beirut, the fireworks and bonfires on our arrival in London on Guy Fawkes Day—left me with a sense of vertigo—dizziness and a feeling that I was falling down, my legs liquefying under me. In London my older son, who was three, begged to be carried. I picked him up and he puked on my shoulder.

  London was cold and damp, black streets, black buildings. I had not been cold for eight years. I was distracted, and in the confusion of Waterloo station, heading for the train to Dorset, burdened with boxes and suitcases, the children pale and limp with fatigue, I was approached by a porter pulling an iron baggage cart. He was black, some of the travelers were black, the sweepers I saw were black.

  “Jambo, kitu gani?” I said, because the porter had hesitated.

  He drew back further and did not greet me in return.

  “Mimi nataka mipagazi awiri,” I went on. “Sasa hivi.”

  He did not seem to care that another porter was needed right now, as my boxes and cases were tottering.

  “Kasha ume anguka,” I said, drawing his attention to a tipped-over box, and wishing for him to fasten them all on his cart, I directed him, “Fungo mizigo hii.” But where was my umbrella? “Mwavulo uko wapi?”

  The man was smiling, not helping, not moving.

  “Jina lako nani?” I asked, because it sometimes helped if you knew a porter’s name.

  But he said nothing. The children began to fuss. My wife was tugging my arm. At that point I lost it and decided to tell him to bugger off.

  “Twende,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” my wife said.

  Only then did I realize that I had been mumbling to the man in Swahili. Not out of my mind, but out of my element.

  A three-hour train ride brought us to the depths of the countryside. It was visibly different from and preferable to the parklike countryside nearer London. Here the hills were rougher, higher, and continuous; the trees were taller, the stone walls wider and more tumbled. Nothing was manicured. In our stone house a fire was burning in the fireplace. I found a room to write in at the top of the house. The wind pressed on the window glass, and when it came from the south it had the tang of the sea, which was seven miles away. Big bare oak trees, sodden green fields, muddy lanes, a low sky of tufty clouds. It was hardly three o’clock and already dark.

  I thought: We can stay here about ten years. Then go home.

  A week later, a note from Vidia, not an air letter but a thick white envelope. Please telephone, he wrote, and, frugal as ever, he added, “It’s cheap at weekends and after 6 P.M.”

  8

  The 9:50 to Waterloo

  HIS BUNGALOW he called The Bungalow, though many years after I first saw it, I discovered that its real name was Teasel Cottage. The truth was important to Vidia, but who could blame him for suppressing the fact of that silly name?

  Small and squat and bad for his asthma, The Bungalow was the sort of contrived structure he usually called bogus and hated for its distressed flint and its quaintness—and here he was living in one. But this bungalow was on the grounds of a famous estate, Wilsford Manor, which I suspected Vidia liked for its old-fashioned glamour and its history of house parties. Wilsford’s owner, known as an eccentric—as wealthy lunatics are always described—was so completely crazy that the manor house was little more than an asylum in which he was the sole inmate.

  The manor house of the estate was a expensive fraud, made to look ancient but actually fairly new, built around 1900 by Lord Glenconner and anticipating Disneyland fakery in its late-seventeenth-century style of checkered flint and stone. It had ornate gables, and even the sort of mullioned windows that Vidia had scorned in an air letter. It was surrounded by made-to-look-old walls and phony gates, and it was secluded, on a side road that looked more like a lane, near Amesbury, outside a village called Lake (the mythical home of Sir Launcelot). There was no lake but there was a river, the Avon—another Avon, one of very many, for “avon” in Old English means river.

  The river ran through Wilsford Manor. Earlier generations who had lived on the land had created water meadows in the low boggy ground near the river. In full daylight the sky was a high and wide dome over Salisbury Plain, and Stonehenge was an hour’s walk through farmers’ fields. “Stoners,” Vidia called it, and sometimes “the Henge.” What was striking about Wilsford Manor were its trees, nearly all of them dead, having been throttled by dense climbing ivy, clumps and clusters of it. From the windows of The Bungalow these dead black trees were visible, strangled but still standing, thickly bandaged with ivy.

  “He loves to look at ivy,” Vidia said. “He doesn’t care that it kills the trees.”

  Stephen Tennant, he meant, the lord of Wilsford Manor. Teasel Cottage had been built for him but he had never used it. Tennant had various hearty ancestors and a few well-known relatives, some of them having titles. He himself was “The Honorable,” which was decisive proof that Vidia was right when he guffawed over “crooked aristocrats” and mocked English titles as meaningless.

  Tennant had been out of his mind for years. “I am the Prince Youssoupoff of England!” he sometimes screamed. His hair was dyed purple, and sometimes hennaed. He put on makeup every morning, crimson lipstick, rouge for his cheeks, and eye shadow—he was said to have sixty-six shades of eye shadow. He never went anywhere without his teddy bear and his toy plush monkey. Though he seldom stirred outsid
e his house, he was not a recluse; he sometimes traveled to Bournemouth to buy cosmetics, and now and then went to London and even New York. He wrote bad poems. Before he went completely off his head, he had been a socialite. He had known Willa Cather and E. M. Forster, and one of his lovers had been the war poet Siegfried Sassoon. He also painted. His childishly hyperbolic pictures were of cartoonish men, sailors mostly, lascars, matelots, with the faces of lecherous cherubs, big biceps, and improbable bulges in their trousers, some like cucumbers and some like cantaloupes.

  An idle, silly queen, Stephen Tennant was upper class and rich, so people laughed at his jokes and called him marvelous. He was looked after by a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Skull—“the Skulls,” Vidia called them, always referring to John and Mary Skull as a pair. In protecting Tennant and attending to him, the Skulls, kindly and long-suffering, had become the sort of English servants who were indistinguishable from masters. They had power—nanny power, butler boldness, “Begging your pardon, sir, but...”—and they stood between sad, giggling Stephen and the world. Were anyone to attempt to remove the strangling ivy from the trees on the estate, the Skulls would put a stop to that, smartish, as they might say. “We’ll have none of that here.”

  But the black ivy made the place spooky and gave the trees an asymmetrical shape. The density and damage of the ivy obscured the varieties and species of the trees. They had the starkness of gallows, all standing in the soggy water meadows.

  After almost nine years in the tropics, I could not believe how dark and unfriendly this landscape looked. Haunted was a perfect word for it. It seemed to me the weirdest place I had ever been. I felt a stronger sense of alienation than I had ever known in Bundibugyo. I looked at the dead and decaying trees and thought of Tennant.

  The oddest thing was that Vidia had not set eyes on Tennant. In the event, after fifteen years Vidia had only a glimpse of the man, and he never spoke to him. Of all the strange places Vidia had lived, this was by far the strangest. But The Bungalow was cheap: Vidia paid his nominal rent to Lord Glenconner, Stephen’s brother Christopher Tennant, and Vidia became the writer at the bottom of the garden, living within shouting distance of a crackpot who often said, “Some people think I’m a genius.”

  The Bungalow was poorly lit, with a low ceiling and thick cold walls and small windows. The flatness of Wiltshire was unlike anything in the west of Dorset, the neighbor county, where we lived. We were seventy miles away, in the rugged hills at the lip of Marshwood Vale, among the hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, sportive briars, and crumbling rock walls and earthworks. Near our house, called The Forge, there were old hill forts and small dark churches. The nearest church, in the village of Stoke Abbott, had been built in the eleventh century. The Forge had five rooms. I sat in the smallest one upstairs, writing my novel Saint Jack. Singapore and sunlight and mischief on my inky pages; and outside my window dark skies, wet lumpy fields, and black leafless trees, all oaks, which howled when the salt wind tore through their branches.

  Please telephone, please visit, Vidia had written.

  “You are phoning at the most expensive time of day!” he said when I spoke to him. It was eleven in the morning. I was not extravagant but careless. I was eager to see him again. We agreed on a day.

  Vidia had prepared me for the social rituals of English life, the stages of getting acquainted, which started with a cup-of-coffee meeting and progressed, as the friendship ripened, to drinks at five and then the greater commitment of lunch. Dinner was the highest level of intimacy. “Dinner is grand,” Vidia said. “Dinner is important.” Meals and rituals meant a great deal to him. He always insisted on choosing the wine, though he seldom paid for it. (“People enjoy paying. I don’t want to spoil their pleasure.”) He noticed the quality of the food, even if he did not eat much. He judged people by what they offered him—the restaurant, the meal, the wine, the conversation, even the way that people dressed. If they were badly dressed he was insulted. He took everything personally. Your shoes not shined? That was a comment on him. Your scruffiness was rudeness.

  I had bought a bottle of wine in our market town of Bridport, on the river Brit, and set off with my wife, leaving plenty of time for the trip, knowing Vidia to be an obsessive timekeeper. Lateness was also rudeness.

  Preparing for such a visit, I was always reminded of his once saying about someone, “You see? He is afraid he is going to do something wrong and therefore he does everything wrong. Anxious about failing, he fails. It is almost deliberate.”

  But Vidia was also my friend. The last time we had been together, I was in Uganda and had published nothing. Five years had passed. I had published Waldo, Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play, Murder in Mount Holly, Jungle Lovers. I was done with V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work. I had just received an advance copy of my collection of short stories, Sinning with Annie. I was half done with Saint Jack. Eight books: I was thirty.

  My advances had been small, my sales modest; still, I knew I had done the right thing in chucking my Singapore job and striking out on my own. I had done it with Vidia’s encouragement. He had insisted there was no middle way. A writer had to be a free man. Anyone with a salary and a boss and office obligations was not free.

  This subject came up on the way to Vidia’s.

  “I want to get a job,” my wife said. She had an Oxford education, she was intelligent, and to her—to many women at that time—a job represented a sort of freedom.

  “What will you do in Dorset?”

  “We’ll have to move to London. There are no jobs here.”

  But I liked Dorset, liked its darkness most of all—I wanted to write about it. This remote part of Dorset had pagan roots, witch stories, and on its prettiest churches ugly-faced gargoyles known locally as hunky-punks; it was deeply rural, snug and distant and cozy. The rent was low, and the hinterland was full of dropouts, potters and painters, farm laborers, rat catchers, and farriers. I met them at the pub, playing darts and skittles and bar billiards, at the Gollop Arms in South Bowood, which was not even a hamlet, just a crossroads. Up the road, at Four Ashes, another crossroads, there was a haunted house, called The Black House.

  We traveled east on the road to Vidia’s, talking about jobs; from Powerstock to Evershot and Wynford Eagle and Toller Porcorum and Puddletown near Tolpuddle, and onward past East Coker, where T. S. Eliot was buried.

  “This is so beautiful,” I said.

  “I’d rather be in London,” she said.

  The thought of sooty bricks and filthy air and sour faces in London only depressed me, and in this mood of disagreement we arrived at Wilsford Manor and rolled up to The Bungalow. Vidia, who was a keen receptor of vibrations, definitely sensed the unresolved conflict, a sense of static and clatter in the air. I could tell, because he was so solicitous. He also knew a thing or two about marital quarrels. He was chirping, glad to see us.

  “Before we go in—look. You see that wall?”

  It was a thick cracked battlement near The Bungalow.

  “It’s not real,” Vidia said. “One is supposed to see it from the window, but up close—look! It is just a folly. It tricks the eye.”

  Pat emerged, chafing her red hands, looking harassed, always the nervous cook: she was obviously flustered in her cooking.

  “This is for you, Vidia.” I gave him the bottle of Beaune and my advance copy of Sinning with Annie, inscribed To Vidia and Pat, with love, Paul.

  “Paul, Paul.” He glanced at the label. His phrase for such a gesture was “swiftly assessed.” He saw everything in a flash. The wine passed. He commented on the car, a Singer, and on my shirt, my jacket.

  “How well you look,” Vidia said. “So young, and you are working so hard.”

  “Such a long way,” Pat was saying to my wife in her purring voice as she led her into the house. Women with women, men with men.

  “Vidia, you have something on your nose.”

  I did not want to say “in your nostrils,” but his fingers went to his nostrils.

/>   “Snuff,” he said. “I’m passionate about it. Want to try some?”

  The snuff was in small tins that looked like pillboxes. Vidia had five or six of them—different flavors. But this was not the time for snuff; that was for after lunch. He was tapping the containers of snuff and puffing his pipe as Pat finished setting the table, my wife helping. Vidia and I, the men, were kicking our heels, waiting to be fed. I felt awkward doing nothing, but Vidia chatted happily about snuff. He always converted an enthusiasm into a study. Last year it had been muesli, next year it would be vintage port or the stock market or his garden.

  “Do sit down,” Pat said.

  We had soup, then poached salmon and potatoes and brussels sprouts. There was a green salad in a bowl that went untouched. Pat was too frazzled and anxious to meet the implacable demands of a kitchen, too unconfident to juggle cookbooks. An insecure person is lost in front of a stove. Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation—experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way. And Vidia was a challenge: a vegetarian food snob who could not cook and who never helped. He sat and was served.

  “I want you to try some of this, Paul.”

  He poured. I sipped.

  “Hold it in your mouth. There—do you taste the almonds, the peaches? It’s a complex finish, oaken with a hint of chalk. Do you get it? Isn’t it delicious? It must be savored.”

  He tipped some into my wife’s glass.

  “I won’t have any,” Pat said.

  He sipped from his own glass. “And just the slightest hint of rose petals.”

  “It’s very good,” my wife said.

  “Have some salad,” Pat said. “Vidia is so difficult. He won’t eat salad. Just fusses.”

  Vidia shrugged. He was fastidious, unyielding, always on the lookout for any sign of meat. Meat disgusted him. It was flesh, it was sinew, it reduced the eater to the level of a cannibal. I always had the sense that he was talking about much more than meat when he was talking about meat. Gravy was just as bad, for the way it tainted vegetables. “Tainted” was a favorite word.